Modern English and American literature

Laura Wilson (b.1939) has worked briefly as a teacher, and more successfully as an editor of non-fiction books. She has written history books for children and is interested in history, particularly of the recent past, painting and sculpture, uninhabited buildings, underground structures, cemeteries and time capsules. She has published the psychological crime novels, A Little Death and Dying Voices, and My Best Friend, which was published in 2001.

These are but just a few more names of masters of pen of the newest period.

Comprehension Questions and Tasks

1. Speak on the life and creative activity Agatha Christie. Describe the central figures of Agatha Christie's novels. Speak upon the most significant books of the writer.

2. Give a brief account of the life and the literary work of Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, A.N. Wilson, Jennifer Johnston, Sheila Jansen, Edward Rutherfurd, Amanda Brookfield. What joins these authors?



AMERICAN LITERATURE

UNIT 5. AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE FIRST HALF AND THE MIDDLE OF THE XX-TH CENTURY. NEW WAVES

The central distinguishing element of American literature is a strong strain of realism, seen earlier in perhaps America's greatest novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain and also in its greatest, or at least, most extensive work of poetry, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). Also, at its best there is a high moral tone to American literature reflected in the constant anguish over the loss of ideals and failure of the American dream to provide opportunity for all.

American poetry in the 20th century had flourished best. Breaking away from the thin verse and sentimentality that had come to prevail at the end of the 19th century, Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) led the way in giving both substance and firmness to his poems, especially in his sketches of small-town New Englanders in The Children of the Night (1897), Captain Craig (1902), The Town Down the River (1910), and The Man Against the Sky (1916). Robert Frost (1874-1963) added further strength through the warmth of A Boy's Will (1913) and succeeding volumes, creating a modern American version of the pastoral. With dry humor and a fine dramatic ear, he wrote the most popular and most critically esteemed American poetry in the 20th century.

By the end of the century's first decade many significant poets had begun to write, and by the end of the 1920's a true renaissance had come. Poets like Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950), in Spoon River Anthology (1915), Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931), with what he called the “higher vaudeville imagination” of General William Booth Enters into Heaven (1913) and The Congo (1914), and Carl Sandburg, in Chicago Poems (1916) and Cornhuskers (1918), gave a Midwestern liveliness to the poetic scene. Hart Crane in White Buildings (1926) showed an intense Verbal power.

Others to amplify the new resurgence of verse making were William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, who showed a precision of ear and a sharpness of eye for significant detail that rank her among the finest American poets. “Anything”, wrote William Carlos Williams, who was a doctor as well as a poet, “that a poet can effectively lift from its dull bed by force of the imagination becomes his material. Anything.” Such knowledge was liberation. In poetry as in fiction, Southern authors became eminent.

One important literary movement of the time was Imagism, whose poets focused on strong, concrete images. New Englander Amy Lowell poured out exotic, impressionistic poems; Marianne Moore, from the midwestern city of St. Louis, Missouri, was influenced by Imagism but selected and arranged her images with more discipline. Ezra Pound began as an Imagist but soon went beyond into complex, sometimes obscure poetry, full of references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature. Living in Europe, Pound influenced many other poets, especially T.S. Eliot.

Eliot was also born in St. Louis but settled in England. He wrote spare, intellectual poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. His poem, written in 1922, The Waste Land spun out, in fragmented, haunting images, a pessimistic vision of post-World War I society. From then on, Eliot dominated the so-called “Modern” movement in poetry. Another Modernist, E.E. Cummings, called attention to his poetry by throwing away rules of punctuation, spelling, and even the way words were placed on the page. His poems were song-like but satiric and humorous. The Enormous Room (1922) by E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), an account of his imprisonment in World War I, told the story of man's ability to refresh his senses despite symbolic regimentation, E.E. Cummings brought gaiety and freshness in poems whose unorthodox typography is no less vital to their success than the continuing youthfulness of his responses. Dos Passos was equally experimental. “Three words that still have meaning”, he said, “that I think we can apply to all professional writing are discovery, originality, invention.”

Wallace Stevens, in contrast, wrote thoughtful speculations on how man can know reality. Stevens' verse was disciplined, with understated rhythms, precisely chosen words and a cluster of central images. The poetry of William Carlos Williams, with its light, supple rhythms, was rooted in Imagism, but Williams, a New Jersey physician, used detailed impressions of everyday American life.

In the aftermath of World War I many novelists produced a literature of disillusionment. Some lived abroad and were known as “the Lost Generation.” F.Scott Fitzgerald's novels capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's great theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, was of youth's golden dreams turning to disappointment. His prose was exquisite, yet his vision was essentially melancholy and nostalgic. Aldous Huxley (1894-1969) in his first published novels, The Defeat of Youth (1918), Limbo (1920), and Crome Yellow (1921) displays the verve, wit, and wicked sense of fun that captivated the post war generation. While living in Italy for several years Huxley associated with D.H.Lawrence, and there he wrote Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928), His most famous book, Brave New World, appeared in 1932. In it Huxley describes an anti-utopia, an ironic fantasy vision of a soullessly scientific, dehumanized future. In 1937 Huxley settled in California, working there as a screenwriter. He continued to pursue an interest in mysticism, evident in especially in his books Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and The Doors of Perception (1954)

War had also affected Ernest Hemingway. Having seen violence and death close at hand, Hemingway adopted a moral code exalting simple survival and the basic values of strength, courage and honesty. In his own writing, he cut out all unnecessary words and complex sentence structures, concentrating on concrete objects and actions. The crisply intense prose style of Hemingway was as influential in French and Italian writing as in American as he sought the direct communication of intense feeling in the fewest possible words. His main characters were usually tough, silent men, good at sports or war but awkward in their dealings with women. Among his best books were The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He eventually won the Nobel Prize and is considered one of the greatest American writers.

Another expatriate, Henry Miller, used a comic, anecdotal style to record his experiences as a down-and-out artist in Paris. Miller's emphasis on sexual vitality made his books, such as Tropic of Cancer (1934), shocking to many, but others felt that his frank language brought a new honesty to literature.

Southerner Thomas Wolfe felt like a foreigner not only in Europe but even in the northern city of New York, to which he had moved. Though he rejected the society around him, he did not criticize it - he focused obsessively on himself and on describing real people from his life in vivid characterizations. His long novels, such as Of Time and the River and You Can't Go Home Again, gushed forward, powerful, romantic and rich in detail, although emotionally exhausting.

Another southerner, William Faulkner, found in one small imaginary corner of the state of Mississippi, deep in the heart of the South, enough material for a lifetime of writing. Faulkner saw the South as a decayed culture, and his characters were often eccentric or grotesque. His social portraits were realistic, yet his prose style was experimental. To show the relationship of the past and the present, he sometimes jumbled the time sequence of his plots; to reveal a character's primitive impulses and social prejudices, he recorded unedited the ramblings of his or her consciousness. Some of his best novels are The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Light in August (1932). Faulkner, too, won a Nobel Prize.

Historical fiction became increasingly popular in the Depression, for it allowed readers to retreat to the past. The most successful of these books was Gone With the Wind, a 1936 best-seller about the Civil War by a southern woman, Margaret Mitchell. Mitchell's characters, especially her heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, and hero, Rhett Butler, were realistically drawn, although the plot at times became melodramatic.

The western novel became popular in the 1940s. The earliest westerns had been adventures of cowboys and Indian fighters, published in cheap fiction magazines in the late 19th century. Owen Wister's novel The Virginian (1902) had introduced a rugged, self-contained cowboy hero, who embodied the American ideal of the individualist.

The new century in American letters brought with it a direct reflection of the disturbing impact of industrialization and urbanization on the ways of life. It also brought new definitions of reality, both scientific and philosophical, that the 19th century had been formulating at the expense of orthodox beliefs. The scope of literary reference was broadened as well as disturbed. Experimental psychology had opened a new approach to the operations of the consciousness and then, through the influence of Sigmund Freud revealed the inherent drama of the subconscious. In stylistics, as well as in subject matter, the new science had its effects on authors, leading them toward meaningful experiments in the communication of realities. The romantic efforts of earlier writers, like Whitman and Emily Dickinson, to originate styles to fit their individual personalities were extended by Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and others to devise a syntax appropriate to non-Aristotelian logic and new concepts of time. They were not simply trying to be different; on their own 20th century terms they were impelled by an Emersonian intention to make patterns of words correspond to the newly defined nature of things. With such efforts went an increased sense of literary responsibility. Although the modern ways of thinking meant a temporary and confusing dislocation of the man of feeling from his traditional values and modes of expression, the birth of the century was intellectually exciting.

The 20th century attempt to understand the nature of things and develop a new vocabulary and syntax for expressing it led, significantly for the writer, into the development of formalized aesthetic considerations and the emergence of a mature American literary criticism. The distinguished discussions by Henry James of his own intentions and tactics were succeeded by the work of a long line of writers who in their analyses of craft paralleled the influence of their own artistic successes. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens were notable examples. Editions of the letters of Pound, Hart Crane, and Stevens deepened the influence of their formal writing. So did the critical comments of Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein's writings about writing may well prove to be her most important contribution to letters.

In the career of Theodore Dreiser, and with the appearance of Sister Carrie (1900), American fiction entered a new phase of franker realism in its approach to contemporary life. Dreiser drew from the experiences of his own family for his story of the unpunished rise of a woman of easy virtue; he knew that the “way up” carried unresolved ambiguities with it. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (written 1892; privately published 1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which treated cowardice rather than cavalier glory in war, had helped to open the way for unconventional attitudes and subject matter. Many writers turned toward the dark shadows on the American dream. Frank Norris (1870-1902) in The Octopus (1901) dealt with the strangulation by the railroads of independent wheat growers in California. The Jungle (1906), by Upton Sinclair, was based on the evils of the Chicago meat-packing industry.

A new moral didacticism in fiction developed. But most novels in this literary manner of social engineering lacked the ungainly vitality and sympathetic understanding of Dreiser's amoral portraits of Jennie Gerhardt (1911) and of the Darwinian rise of the American business magnate in The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914). Dreiser shifted from the purely personal ethic of these works to a social ethic in An American Tragedy (1925), his greatest novel. Here he indicted society in the guilt of a weak-willed youth tried for murder, for society had held up the goal of success without providing an accompanying morality. The story was an American tragedy, because in a country where the people are themselves their only king, whenever a part of society falls, all society drags itself down in a democratic version of Aristotelian tragedy.

Other writers examined themselves and their society. Jack London (1876-1916) wrote much the same kind of fictional self-analysis in Martin Eden (1909), although he is best known for his vigorous tales of Alaska (The Call of the Wild. 1903) and of the Pacific (The Sea-Wolf, 1904).

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), in Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and Dodsworth (1929) gave the most popularly received picture of the American tortured, as he put it, like “a god self-slain on his modern improved altar.” Lewis was a graphic writer. He prepared his image-breaking novels with the precision of a sociologist, gathering characteristic details to integrate into his studies of the crippling small-town and average-city life of businessmen, scientists, preachers, and reformers. In 1930, Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Sherwood Anderson (1876-194)), in the plotless tales of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and The Triumph of the Egg (1921), showed the tentative gestures of man desperately groping for beauty and fulfillment in the face of personal inhibitions and social frustrations.

Among other significant representatives of the group as writers of fiction were Katherine Anne Porter, best known for her short stories and the novel Ship of Fools (1962), Eudora Welty, and Truman Capote.

Women writers began to look at the complexity of life more as men did. Edith Wharton (1862-1937) approached the problem through the novel of manners. The House of Mirth (1905) and The Custom of the Country (1913) are successful examples of her dissections of the upper classes. Her Ethan Frame (1911), a grim tragedy of the Berkshires, is less typical. Ellen Glasgow (1874-1945), whose first novel appeared in 1897, contrasted the agrarian way of life with the emergent Southern industrialism. She was no sentimentalist. “What the South needs is blood and irony”, she said. Willa Cather (1873-1947), the finest stylist among the women writers, and a master of tonal effect, developed the same troubled response to her age. In such early novels as O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918) she had dealt with the robust creativity of women who lived close to the Nebraskan farmlands and to life. But A Lost Lady (1923), a portrait of moral dependency, began her criticism of a country she felt had lost its pioneering strength.



Theodore Dreiser

1871-1945

Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. His family was poor, and his childhood was blighted by misery and humiliation. His father was a religious bigot. The family moved constantly from town to town but Theodore Dreiser spent most of his childhood in Warshaw, Indiana, where he attended public school. Later his teacher enabled him to go for one year (1888-1889) to the Indiana University, which he had to leave because of money difficulties. He moved to Chicago, where he supported himself by doing odd jobs. Working in an estate office, in a laundry and as a rent collector for a wholesale furniture company, he had the possibility to store up impressions which later appeared in his novels.

In 1892 Dreiser turned to journalism working as a newspaper reporter and editor in Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland and Pittsburg. Then he moved to New York, where he attained work as a magazine editor.

The first significant work by Dreiser was his novel Sister Carrie (1900). This novel is a study of Carrie Meeber, an innocent Wisconsin girl, who comes to Chicago to find work and falls into an intricate network of temptation. The book, being realistic and true, mercilessly exposed bourgeois society. Hardly had the book appeared when it was pronounced immoral and withdrawn. Dreiser started his long fight against censorship and for the right of the novelist to present life as he saw it.

Only ten years later, in 1911, Dreiser's second novel Jennie Gerhardt was published. Like Sister Carrie this novel was a challenge to the moral claims of the American bourgeoisie. The publishing of Jennie Gerhardt roused further storm of criticism from readers and publishers who declared it immoral.

The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914) together with The Stoic (published posthumously in 1947) form The Trilogy of Desire, a complete life story of an American capitalist, showing the unscrupulousness of the big capitalists. These three novels are the most highly documented and detailed of Dreiser's works; they are also interesting as a panoramic picture of the industrial triumph at the end of the XIX century in America.

The Genius (1915) was banned soon after, like Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. It is the tragic story of a young painter Eugene Witla, who breaks down under the cruel injustice of the capitalist system. In Eugene Witla we can easily recognize the author himself, with the difference that Eugene finally broke down, while Theodore Dreiser continued his struggle to the last days of his life.

An American Tragedy (1925) is Dreiser's best known novel. It is the story of a young American who is gradually corrupted by the morals and manners of American capitalist society and the lust of gain which reigns in the USA until he becomes a criminal and murderer. The significance of the novel is in the exposure of the American way of life with its contrast of poverty and wealth, corrupt bourgeois morals and political system.

In 1928, after visiting the Soviet Union he published a book entitled Dreiser Looks at Russia.

The economic crisis of 1929-1932 in America was justly considered by Dreiser as a sign of the inevitable doom of American capitalism and he set forth his view in Tragic America (1931), a masterly description of the gross injustice of society. Exposure of the moral, political and economic criteria of his native land animated all of his notable novels. In them devastating influence and the inhumanity of American capitalism upon the life of the people is laid bare.

The years preceding World War I and those that followed it were marked by a crisis of his ideology and the dominant tendency of naturalism. Influenced by the growth of progressive forces throughout the world Dreiser gradually overcame the crises and reached a higher stage of realism.

Dreiser's other most popular works besides the already mentioned include: Free and Other Stories (1918), A Book about Myself (1922), The Color of a Great City (1923), A Gallery of Women (1929), America is Worth Saving (1941), The Bulwark (1946).

An American Tragedy. This novel may be regarded as the climax of Dreiser's literary career. The plot of the novel is partly based on court records of an actual trial. But although the bare details are thus borrowed from reality, the implications and moral conclusions of the story are Dreiser's own.

The novel is a criticism of the “American Dream” - the unlimited opportunity and quick success in a new country, where social barriers are flexible. The novel is a study of social classes and of an individual's effort to rise from one into another; it involves also a moral analysis of guilt in the manner of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Clyde Griffiths is a sensitive and unhappy youth whose parents are Kansas City street evangelists. Humiliated by his sordid family life and by the narrow bigoted morality his parents force upon him, he longs to escape into a finer and more rewarding environment. He works for a while as a bell-hop in a Kansas City Hotel, where he is vividly impressed with the contrasts between his own poverty and the opulence and importance of the hotel guests. Meanwhile a moral crisis presents itself. His sister Hester runs off with an actor who presently deserts her; she returns home pregnant, miserable, and without means. Clyde is moved by her plight, but instead of helping her he turns weakly to spend his money on Hortense Briggs, a vain and shrewdly calculating girl.

One day Clyde, several other bell-boys and several girls set off on an escapade in a borrowed car. The driver runs down a little girl and wrecks the car trying to escape from the police. Clyde flees to Chicago, changes his name in an effort to avoid his part of the responsibility for the incident. While working at a hotel in Chicago he meets his wealthy uncle Samuel Griffiths, who offers him a job in one of his collar factories in Lycurgus, New York. For a time Clyde's fortunes seem to rise. But after a while he finds himself in a frustrating social situation. He is embarrassed in the company of his snobbish relatives, yet he is forbidden to approach the lower-class shop girls who work in his department. One of the girls, Roberta Alden, attracts him, and after a time he falls in love with her and their relations become intimate. But Clyde's attention is soon transferred to another girl, the wealthy and socially prominent Sondra Finchley. Sondra is the key to all his ambitions; he imagines all his problems to be solved by marrying her. But Roberta is an obstacle on his way to climb up the social ladder; she is pregnant and she piteously demands Clyde to marry her. He is faced with a cruel moral dilemma: shall he stand by Roberta thus abandoning what may be his last chance to rise into the world? At that critical moment he reads a news account of a boating accident in which a girl is drowned while her companion's body is not found. Horrified at his own thoughts, he half-resolves to free himself by ending Roberta's life. He lures her to a remote resort and rents a boat for a lake excursion. His preparations for the crime, however, are hopelessly incompetent. He has registered under two different false names at hotels, and now he betrays by several signs the fact that he does not intend to return to the hotel. At the moment of decision he almost loses his nerves. Noticing his perturbation, Roberta stands up in the boat, and reaches toward him; the boat capsizes accidentally, Clyde's camera swings and strikes Roberta on the head. She falls into the water, she can't swim and she is drowned. Clyde swims ashore and flees in guilty terror across the country-side. He is not certain, whether he is guilty of Roberta's death, but he knows in his own mind that he did not exert himself to save her during the seconds she floated on the water. Arrested, he is tried for murder. The defense argues that he is a morally deficient person who is not responsible for his acts.

The author shows how different people and institutions work. Clyde's uncle cares more not about his nephew but about his name being involved in the case which can damage his reputation and business. Newspaper reporters rush to the home of Roberta's parents to fish out hot new. They do not care about the feelings and sufferings of people. High officials need the victory in the trial and they do all possible to prove that Clyde has committed the murder deliberately. Otherwise they can lose the election campaign which was in full swing at the time. When no direct evidence was found, it had been finally manipulated. A hair was torn off from Roberta's head and squeezed between the lenses of the camera, and then the camera was produced as a weapon of the murder.



Robert Frost

1874-1963

Robert Frost is the poet whom Americans most closely identify with New England. Long before he became known as the greatest American poet of his time, Robert Frost worked as a farmer, a bobbin boy in a Massachusetts mill, a shoemaker and a teacher in country schools.

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California on March 26, 1874. Frost's ancestors were Scotch-English. His mother was of a Scottish seafaring family of Orkneyan origin, a schoolteacher whose name appears in most records as Isabelle Moody (the proper spelling was Moodie). His father - William Prescott Frost became a teacher, then an editor, then a politician. His health did not stand the strains. When he died of tuberculosis in his early thirties, Robert was ten years old. The fatherless boy grew into the independent young man. His mother took him back to Massachusetts. He first saw the New England landscapes and knew the changing seasons that he would later describe with the familiarity of a native son. After high school there, Frost entered Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. He decided after a few months that he was not yet ready for higher education, and he returned to Lawrence to work in the cotton mills and to write. His verses, however, found little favor with magazine editors. He relished the sheer music of Edgar Poe, as much as the meaningfulness of Emerson. He saw his first poem printed in the Lawrence High School Bulletin. His mother was proud, but the rest of the family were alarmed. His grandfather said: “No one can make a living at poetry. But I tell you what: we'll give you a year to make a go of it. And you'll have to promise to quit writing if you can't make a success of it in a year. What do you say?” “Give me twenty - give me twenty”, he said. In his early twenties, married to a pretty girl Elinor Miriam White and with a growing family, Frost finally began to feel the need for a more formal education than his random reading could provide. He took his family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to please his family he entered Harvard in his 22 and stayed there for only two years. Meanwhile, he earned a living as a schoolteacher, taking his mother's class away from her, and as an editor before deciding to try farming.

He later wrote of his decision to leave the University: “Harvard had taken me away from the question of whether I could write or not”.

His grandfather was disappointed, but he gave Robert a farm near Derry, New Hampshire. For ten years, Frost tilled the stony New Hampshire soil on thirty acres. But he decided that the concentration demanded by writing poetry did not mix with the round-the-clock physical effort of working the land. Discouraged, he returned to teaching for a few years; then in 1912 he sought a complete change of scene by selling his farm and taking his family to England.

The move turned out to be a wise one. Stimulated by meeting English poets, Frost continued to write poetry, though he found his subjects in New England. In the three years he spent abroad, he completed the two volumes that would make him famous - A Boy's Will appeared in 1913 and another book of poetry, North of Boston was published in 1914. It was as simple as that. Too simple, perhaps - no influential friends, no publicity, nothing to win favour except the poetry. But Frost had to wait more than twenty years from the time of his first poem in a high school magazine to the time of his first book. When the first volume appeared the poet was thirty-eight years old. These collections included several poems that would stand among Frost's best-known works: “The Tuft of Flowers”, “In Hardwood Groves”, “Mending Wall”, “The Death of the Hired Man”, and “After Apple-Picking”. These poems were marked by a flinty realism and an impressive mastery of iambic rhythm, narrative dialogue, and the dramatic monologue.

When he returned home in 1915, he discovered that his success in England had spread to the United States. He was now an accomplished writer who had already extended the scope and character of American literature into the twentieth century.

In 1916, the publication of Mountain Interval - a collection that included such favourites as “The Road Not Taken”, “Birches” solidified his fame. He chose his own way in life and poetry which he stressed upon in “The Road Not Taken”:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

He was rewarded with many prizes, including four Pulitzer Prizes for his books of poetry New Hampshire (1924), Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937) and A Witness Tree (1943). He was also awarded numerous honorary degrees by Columbia, Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard and other colleges and universities. He was one of the few authors to receive the Gold Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He deserved the faithful attention of a wide readership. Frost continued to publish fine poetry for fifty years. He reached the height of his popularity after World War II. If America of the 20th century had a national poet, it was Frost.

Frost spent the rest of his life as a lecturer at a number of colleges, and as a public performer who, as he put it, liked to “say” rather than to recite his poetry.

Frost in his later years became a character of his own creation - a lovable, fumbling old gent who could nevertheless pierce the minds and hearts of those able to see beyond his play-acting.

He also taught at Amherst, the University of Michigan, Harvard, and Dartmouth. He lectured and read at dozens of other schools. In 1960 at John F. Kennedy's invitation, Frost became the first poet to read his works at the presidential inauguration. In 1962 he received the rarely awarded Congressional Medal from President Kennedy at a White House ceremony. Frost's poetry was popular not only among critics and intellectuals, but also among the general public. In his poems he painted vivid portraits of the New England landscape and captured the flavour of New England life using traditional forms and conversational language. Despite their apparent simplicity, however, his poems are filled with hidden meanings, forcing us to delve beneath the surface to fully appreciate his work. What counts in his poetry is not so much the, meaning as the shades of meaning. His lyrics are remarkable for their delicate and precise music. The love of country is not expressed in screaming or hysterical flag-waving but in a salvation of faith, in surrender to the land.

On Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods are these I think I know,

His house is in the village though;

He will not see my stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf,

So Eden sank to grief

So dawn goes down to day,

Nothing gold can stay.

No other poet has been so successful in combining an outer lightness and an inner gravity. His verse has a growing intimacy: it radiates an honest neighbourliness in which wit and wisdom are joined. Frost was a person whose life was sometimes lifted to a high pitch of feeling and who had the gift of making others share his excitement. He thought in images and dreamt in fantasy; he lived by poetry. Whether in dialogue or in lyric, his poems are people talking. He knows how to say a great deal in a short space. Frost judges, but he rarely condemns; he is fundamentally serious but never pompous. He accepts the World's contradictions without being crushed by them. He said:

And were an epitaph to be my story,

I'd have a short one ready for my own:

I would have written of me on my stone;

I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

Sherwood Anderson

1876-1941

Sherwood Anderson was born on September 13, 1876, in southern Ohio, the third of seven children. His father was a harness-maker, and his trade was being rendered obsolete by mass production. An easygoing man, the elder Anderson was given to telling tall tales and to heavy drinking.

Since Sherwood often had to help out at home, his schooling was spotty. His mother died when he was fourteen, his father drifted out and away from the family forever, and Anderson's formal education virtually came to an end. He never completed college and was obliged to work at a number of menial jobs.

Anderson eventually became an advertising copywriter, and in the spirit of the new century and the “new age”, he extolled the world of business in his copy. Married and a family man, he bought a paint factory and continued to write copy ennobling the life he had chosen, even though he felt trapped in it. He was, he later said, following an adage often repeated to him: “Get money. Money makes the mare go.” On November 27, 1912, at the age of thirty-seven, Anderson left the factory muttering, leaving his co-workers with the idea that he had lost his mind.

In 1916, at the age of forty, he produced Windy Mc Pherson's Son, a novel about a man, who, like the author himself, abandons his business in order to find truth. In 1917 appeared Marching Men. But his early writings were only moderately successful.

In 1919, Anderson published Winesburg, Ohio, a series of short stories about the people in a small mid-western town. It is now an American classic. But when it first appeared, it was called “unclean, filthy”, even by Theodore Dreiser, the popular realistic novelist who had helped Anderson bring his first works to the public.

When the first stories of Sherwood Anderson were published, they were the subjects of heated debate. The structure and focus of this collection of stories were inspired by Edgar Lee Masters's collection of poems called Spoon River Anthology. Anderson was concerned not with well-crafted plots in the traditional sense, but with revealing the secret needs and longings of twenty-two people from one small town. The stories are unified by their characters, by their setting, and by Anderson's theory of the “grotesque”. According to the introduction to Winesburg, Ohio, a grotesque is someone who seizes a single truth out of life and lives by that truth alone. Tragically, these single-minded pursuits drive the characters into isolation. What made the stories in Winesburg shocking was that Anderson also explored the intimate thoughts of his characters. The result was a series of portraits that were honest, unflinching - and, at the time, painful for many to deal with.

Because there are few dramatic events in the Winesburg stories, many readers dismissed them as “non-stories”. One member of the Chicago Group felt that the stories were so formless that Anderson should throw them away. The major complaint from readers, however, dealt with the unconventional subject matter, especially with the themes of sexuality and repression. One woman, who had attended a dinner party with Anderson, sent him a letter saying, “... having sat beside you and having read your stories, I feel that I should never be clean again.”

His other famous story books are The Triumph of the Egg (1921) and Horses and Men (1923).

In his criticism of industry and of the American dream that money will bring happiness, Anderson proposed his own dream of love as happiness. He once wrote:

“I began to gather these impressions. There was a thing called happiness toward which men were striving. They never got to it. All of life was amazingly accidental. Love, moments of tenderness and despair, came to the poor and the miserable as to the rich and successful. It began to seem to me that what was most wanted by all people was love, understanding. Our writers, our storytellers, in wrapping life up into neat little packages, were only betraying life.”

Anderson's subsequent novels Poor White (1920) and Dark Laughter (1925) mark a deterioration of his realistic art. Anderson is more than just a regionalist. He was among the first American authors to become interested in psychological motivation and the unconscious, with the themes of loneliness and alienation constantly recurring. As for himself, Anderson kept “escaping” for the rest of his life. Attractive to women, he married four times and travelled as far as Paris, where he met the writer Gertrude Stein who had an important influence on his work. He also met, in Chicago, a young writer who impressed him. It was Anderson who sent the young man - whose name was Ernest Hemingway - to Paris with a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. During the Depression and the New Deal that followed it, Anderson's stories became oddly dated and irrelevant, though today a few of Anderson's stories have taken their places as American classics. These include such later stories as “The Egg” from The Triumph of the Egg (1921) and “Death in the Woods” and “Brother Death” from Death in the Woods (1933).

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

1896-1940

If ever there was an author whose life and fiction were one, it was Scott Fitzgerald. The America into which Fitzgerald was born and in which he grew up clung to inherited restraints and proprieties. But it was to change dramatically under the impact of the First World War, when inhibition suddenly was shed for exuberance in the crazy, wonderful, irresponsible era of the 1920's. Scott Fitzgerald - handsome, charming, and uncommonly gifted - was not only part of this time; he thought about it and heard the sound of it and wrote about it in a way that gave it the name “The Jazz Age”. He made literary legend of it.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of a father with claims to an aristocratic Maryland family. He was named for an ancestor, Francis Scott Key, the composer of the “Star-Spangled Banner”. His mother was the daughter of a rich Irish immigrant. The young Scott was a spoiled boy, a failure at school work and - to his own great disappointment - at sports. But he was a success at daydreaming and, while still in his teens, at writing stories and plays.

He was educated at Princeton University, which he entered in 1913, where he was active in the theatre and on campus publications until he dropped out in 1917. At Princeton University, he wrote one of the Triangle Club musical shows, contributed to the Nassau Literary Magazine, and befriended the serious writers Edmund Wilson and John Peele Bishop. When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Fitzgerald left college for officers' training school, yearning for heroic adventure overseas on the battlefields of France. He was never sent overseas, but in camp he began work on a novel, The Romantic Egoist. It was twice turned down by the publisher.

Out of the army, Fitzgerald took a low-paying job he hated repairing car roofs at the Northern Pacific shops. “I was an empty bucket”, he said of the experience, “so mentally blunted by the summer's writing that I'd taken a job”. Then he sent his novel, rewritten and retitled This Side of Paradise, off to Scribner's for the third time. In 1919, they agreed to publish it. Soon his autobiographical narrative, set mainly at Princeton, This Side of Paradise, appeared in 1920. It was a sensation. It was an immense popular success and Fitzgerald found himself the appointed spokesman for his generation, the so-called Jazz Age. He sensed the romantic yearnings of the Jazz Age and he put them in his fiction.

His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the self-destructive extravagance of his times.

Fitzgerald concerns the world of youth, excited though somewhat cynical, and the parties and love affairs of the rich and the would-be-rich. He fell in love with Zelda Sayre, a rich, beautiful, talented, high-spirited but unbalanced woman, who lived near Montgomery, Alabama, where he was stationed when he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Although Scott courted her persistently, he had not nearly enough money to offer her the kind of marriage she wanted, and at first she turned him down. After he was discharged at war's end, he went to seek his literary fortune in New York in order to marry her. They married later in April 1920 and lived in New York, Paris, and on the French Riviera. In New York Zelda became the center of a round of parties, while Scott turned out scores of stories which appeared in major national magazines. Later these stories were collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920).

The old, pre-war world with its Victorian code of behavior had been dumped in favor of a great, gaudy spree of new freedoms. Girls bobbed their hair and shortened their skirts, while boys filled their flasks with bootleg gin. To the wail of saxophones, couples danced the Charleston across the nation's dance floors. In young Fitzgerald's novel Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), the Jazz Age had found its definition.

In 1922 he published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned. After a stay in France, the Fitzgeralds returned to St. Paul, where their only child, a daughter named Frances, was born. Scott is also at the height of his popularity and power in the short stories of All the Sad Young Men (1926).

Scott announced to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner's, that he was going to write “something new, something extraordinarily beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” He fulfilled that ambition in The Great Gatsby, a romantic tragedy centering on the destructive power of the glamorous, seductive American Dream, his nearly flawless masterpiece, which was published in 1925. He also knew that between the peaks of joy were periods of sorrow. The Great Gatsby reflects Fitzgerald's deeper knowledge, his recognition that wanting to be happy does not insure one's being so and that pursuit of entertainment may only cover a lot of pain.

The Great Gatsby tells the story of James Gatz, a poor boy from the Middle West who dreams of success and elegance and finds their incarnation in a Louisville girl named Daisy Fay. When Gatz returns from the war he learns she has become Daisy Buchanan, married to a rich Chicagoan and leading a careless, sumptuous life on Long Island. The hero, now a successful bootlegger known as Jay Gatsby, hopes to win Daisy from what he believes is a loveless, unhappy marriage. The mysterious Jay Gatsby discovers the devastating cost of success in terms of personal fulfillment and love. The story ends in Gatsby's death, but we can see that it was his dream, his vulnerability and feeling, that are admirable, and that the Buchanans are insulated from life's possibilities by their wealth and self-indulgence.

The central triumph of The Great Gatsby was its revelation of the rich in all their seductive luxury and heedlessness, accompanied by an implicit condemnation of their way of life. It showed wealth as a numbing, dehumanizing force that can destroy the heart. In a remarkably concise work, Fitzgerald probed deeply the ambiguities of the American dream. One of his masterful innovations in this novel - his manipulation of the point of view - matches the ambiguity of the book's theme. The story is told by Nick Carraway, Daisy's cousin. Nick's attitude, both engaged with the events and yet objective toward them, is often singled out as the ideal narrative point of view. Gatsby, with his vast new wealth acquired by breaking the Prohibition laws, represents extravagance and optimism and the desperate need of the outsider to “belong”. The Great Gatsby won some critical praise, but it was a financial disappointment.

Fitzgerald had to work even harder to keep up with the high cost of his and Zelda's international life. He turned out more pot-boiling short stories, mediocre in quality and written for money. In 1930, the tenth year of their marriage, Zelda suffered a mental breakdown and was to spend the rest of her life in and out of asylums. Hers was a search for both sanity and identity (her identity which seemed to have been devoured by Scott's productiveness). She aspired to be a dancer and a writer, and in 1932 produced her own novel, Save Me the Waltz. This was her thinly disguised account of her troubled marriage.

Scott's novel Tender Is the Night, the ambitious novel, which was published in 1934, was his rebuttal. Tender Is the Night reflects his personal tragedy: his own growing sense of failure and his wife's descent into madness. Zelda suffered a series of nervous breakdowns, his reputation as a writer declined. The hero of Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver, is a young psychiatrist, the protector and healer of the mad heroine, Nicole. Focusing on the decline of a young American psychiatrist following his marriage to a wealthy but unstable woman, the novel reflects Fitzgerald's awareness of the tragedy that can result from obsession with wealth and social status. However, the stock market crash of 1929 had put an end to Fitzgerald's era, and readers had lost interest in the problems of the expatriates like Dick Diver. Still, the book displays Fitzgerald's hard-won experience of life, the commitment to early dreams, the self-destructiveness of charm, and a whole generation's craving for endless youth and irresponsibility. In its despair, Tender Is the Night was an epitaph for the Jazz Age.

It was Fitzgerald's epitaph as well. After its publication, he struggled with mounting debts, failing health, drinking, and depression. Following the stock market crash in 1929 which led to the hard times of the Depression, Fitzgerald's life changed dramatically. Fitzgerald lost his self-confidence and his public during the Depression Era. Financial difficulties forced him to seek work as a Hollywood screenwriter in the middle thirties. Despite illness and alcoholism he managed to write scenarios. When he could, he continued to do serious work. Through his love affair with Sheila Graham, a British journalist, he grew interested in the Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg and began work on a novel about him. He was at work on this novel, The Last Tycoon, in 1940 when he died in Hollywood of heart failure, down and used up. The Last Tycoon was completed by his friend Edmund Wilson and was published after Fitzgerald's death in 1941 to wide critical praise.

William Faulkner

1897-1962

Critics are now unanimous in their opinion that William Faulkner was one of the greatest of all American novelists of the twentieth century.

He was born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. His great grandfather fought in the Civil War, and he wrote romantic fiction. Later he served the model for Colonel John Sartoris in William Faulkner's novels. “I want to be a writer like my great-granddaddy” said William Faulkner when he was nine. He was speaking of Colonel William Clerk Falkner, the family founder. (William Faulkner restored the lost letter u in the family name). Named after him, Faulkner grew up feeling at every turn the giant's tread of this first William: slave-owner, planter, brigadier in the militia, lawyer, railroad king, (“he built the first railroad in our country”, said little William of his great-grandfather). The Faulkners were the owners of the railroad built by the writer's great grandfather, and then the owners of a cottonseed oil mill, and ice plant, a livery stable, and an agency selling petroleum. William learned early to ride and to shoot game. His story The Bear, though not strictly autobiographical, is based on his recollections of autumn days hunting in the woods.

Faulkner attended high school in Oxford, Mississippi. Instead of finishing school and graduating, he had been working for a year as a bookkeeper in a bank. Faulkner hung around the University of Mississippi in Oxford where his father was a business manager.

At the outbreak of World War I, the U.S. Army rejected him because he failed to meet their height and weight requirements. However, in 1918 Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and trained for flight duty, only to see the war end before he was commissioned. He loved flying, and as soon as he could afford, he bought a light plane. After he was demobilized, Faulkner returned to Oxford and spent there over a year as a registered student at Old Miss. But he disliked the way literature was taught there and dropped out to read on his own. He also wrote verse and published the collection The Marble Faun in 1924.

In 1924, he left Oxford for New Orleans, where he made the acquaintance of some members of the New Orleans literary circle, including Sherwood Anderson who had attracted much attention with the publication of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), his study of small-town life. Impressed and encouraged by Anderson, Faulkner tried his hand at fiction.

During the six months he spent in New Orleans Faulkner published a number of stories in a little magazine and wrote his first novel Soldier's Pay (1926), a self-conscious story about the lost generation. Anderson recommended the book to his publisher, and Faulkner's career as a novelist began. In 1927 his second novel Mosquitoes appeared. Thereafter Faulkner wrote with a tireless energy.